In the december issue of Cahiers du Cinema, there’s an interesting interview of Koan Hui, who worked with Tsui Hark on his most famous films. Of course, Koan Hui shares some great details about that:
“At the end of the 80s, I wanted to go to a film school in Los Angeles. But while working on some shootings, I had met Tsui Hark, who convinced me to stay, he told me “Everything you learn at school is garbage. It’ll take you years to relearn everything“. And so my school was the Film Workshop.
In Hong Kong, we say that working at the Film Workshop is like entering a Shaolin temple; it’s exactly that, the master-pupil relationships come naturally and there’s almost a military discipline. Tsui Hark’s martial art is filmmaking. He thinks fast and has so many ideas, everything can be changed quickly.
At this time, computers weren’t as popular as today, and Tsui Hark hand wrote his scripts. But there was a problem, he wrote so fast, nobody could read it. My job was to rewrite these scripts, so that actors & co-workers could read it. I had to understand how worked his mind to build & develop his ideas. That was my training.”
THE BLADE
“Tsui Hark helped to establish rules which became norms. With this film, the idea was to break them. Everything had to work on that direction, based on a “truth style”. Sword films were always stylized, we try to break that by looking for hyper-realism & imperfections in everything; actors’ performance, action and the script. In the first draft of the script, I didn’t write any dialogue, but what was supposed to be expressed. Without limiting actors’ freedom.
The idea was to create spontaneity and unexpected reactions. Everything we write is ruled by the form of the mise-en-scene. For Tsui Hark, intentions must be directly translated into images. Before The Blade, shootings were boring, but here everything was new; we tried to confuse the cinematographer, so that he lose what he was filming. We studied many documentaries, where most of the time, things aren’t expected. The cameraman had to adapt. Same thing for actors and action.”
TIME & TIDE
“The Blade‘s flop left us speechless. I think after this film, Tsui Hark’s rebel & experimental side became stronger. In Hollywood, he just wanted to show he could be known around the world like John Woo or Wong Kar-Wai.
Time & Tide took a long time to be made. The script writing was difficult. Everything started from the idea of 2 characters, enemies but connected by a mysterious link. I wrote countless scripts where one of the character took over the other one, and vice versa, until finding a stability. The film was much more ‘prepared’ than The Blade; we left aside spontaneity to find control again. The script was like a blueprint with all the things we dreamed about. I wrote and shot a scene I dreamed for a very long time, the one with the jump from the building: in Hong Kong, everything is vertical, and we often have this feeling we can fly through the windows. We made that before Spiderman, and I’m proud.
But there was a narrative problem here, we were so immersed into the story, we thought the audience would understand everything, thanks to their new visual references; tv, clips… We were wrong. The first version of the film, 2h30min, was a mess. We had to cut and return to an animated story board we made before shooting.
Tsui Hark’s aim of his life is to make films.”
Rough translation of Vincent Malausa’s interview with Koan Hui.
Scans of the original article can be found here!
